A meteorite found in 2022 in the Sahara Desert in Mali formed at least 4.1 billion years ago in the crust of Mars, making it the oldest of the 435 Martian meteorites found on Earth to date.
Scientists reported that the composition of the Teghaza 001 meteorite provides insights into the environment of the Red Planet early in its history, as it indicates that liquid water existed on its surface, which supports the view that conditions on Mars may have been favorable for the development of microbial life.
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Planetary scientist Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in California, said that the meteorite is “a witness to a time when Mars was likely warmer and wetter than during most of its history.”
The chemistry of the meteorite, a type of igneous rock called gabbro, indicates that it interacted with water as it slowly cooled and crystallized in the Martian subsurface. Although part of the Martian crust, it was formed from magma that originated from greater depths within the planet’s mantle.
Today, Mars is cold, dry, and barren, but there is evidence that water once existed on its surface in the form of rivers, lakes, and even an ocean, in its northern hemisphere billions of years ago.
Teghaza 001 was found in eight pieces—the largest about the size of a fist—in the desert, approximately 34 kilometers from the village of Bir Sali in Mali. Its main minerals are astrios and pyroxene, and it also contains zircon crystals that contain the element uranium. Researchers determined its age using a technique based on the radioactive decay of uranium into lead over time.
“Martian meteorites are our only samples from Mars; they form the basis for understanding the planet’s formation early in its history, and they allow us to assess in a laboratory setting whether Mars could have supported conditions suitable for life,”," said Liu, the lead author of a study published in the scientific journal *Science*.
“The detailed information we can extract from these meteorite samples complements and validates our exploration of Mars using satellites and rovers,” she added.
This information provides insights into how Mars’s evolution diverged from that of Earth when both planets were still “infants” and life began to take root on our planet, Liu said. Earth, Mars, and the other planets in the solar system are estimated to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
Only three Martian meteorites have been found, including Teghaza 001, that date back to the planet’s early history. One of them was discovered in Antarctica in 1984 and was initially thought to be about 4.5 billion years old, but it has recently been determined to be roughly the same age as Teghaza 001. Teghaza 001 is most likely the “older” of the two.
The new findings support the idea that early Mars had the necessary ingredients and conditions to support life, but they do not directly answer the question of whether life actually existed on the planet, explained Lee Sapper, a co-author of the study who works at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the BAER Institute in California. Its chemical composition indicates that it is different from other known meteorites. It may have originated in the southern highlands of the planet, possibly from the Hellas Basin, one of Mars’s largest impact craters, Liu said.
Its history has been eventful.
“It broke off and was ejected into space by an impact on the surface of Mars and traveled until its orbit crossed that of Earth. It then entered Earth’s atmosphere as a meteor and landed in the Sahara, but we don’t know when that happened.
Source: KYPE
